Crazy Town released Darkhorse on November 12, 2002, through Columbia Records. Their second studio album followed the breakthrough of “Butterfly,” which had reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2001. For the follow-up, Crazy Town shared production duties with Howard Benson and put greater emphasis on the band they had become through touring.
Guitarist Kraig “Squirrel” Tyler told The Music that writing began in January 2001, with roughly half the record written before the band returned from the road. Getting their own studio gave them a dedicated place to develop those ideas. Choosing Benson was their decision, too: they wanted help capturing the playing that had developed over several years of shows. “We wanted it to sound like you were in the room listening to us play,” Tyler said.
The demos still reminded Tyler of The Gift of Game, but he heard room to develop the material, particularly as Bret “Epic” Mazur began singing more. Bringing in another producer gave them someone to help push those possibilities. Tyler said the band liked the demos and still believed the songs needed more work. The aim was to retain the feel of musicians playing together while taking the material further.
Mazur described a similarly open approach to the writing. In a 2002 Chart Attack interview excerpted by Blabbermouth, he said the band had avoided setting an agenda based on what listeners might expect from another Crazy Town album. He had been listening to Fugazi and Quicksand while driving to the studio to record vocals, and connected those influences to the emotional directness he wanted in the performances. The abandoned working title, Nothing Comes From Nowhere, reflected his belief that musicians build on existing ideas and reshape them into something of their own.
Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo supplied a guitar solo for “Hurt You So Bad,” which became one of the album’s two singles. His contribution was already being reported before the final album title was announced: a September 2002 Blabbermouth report identified the song simply as “Hurt” and said its inclusion was still uncertain. It ultimately appeared as the second track on Darkhorse.
“Drowning” led the rollout. Columbia reported that it was the most-added song at active rock radio and the second-most-added at modern rock, and its video was airing on MTV2 by December 2002. That early radio interest accompanied a much smaller commercial result for the album. Darkhorse entered the Billboard 200 at No. 120 and spent one week on the chart; The Gift of Game had reached No. 9 and spent 34 weeks on the chart.
Crazy Town went on hiatus in 2003. Their next studio album, The Brimstone Sluggers, arrived in 2015 and placed greater emphasis on alternative hip-hop, moving away from the guitar-focused direction they had pursued with Benson.
